


The End of the World

by Valentined



Series: Pieces of Valentine [7]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Body Dysmorphia, Body Horror, Chaos is a Weapon, FF15 is too if you squint, FF8 is in this, Genesis is a Weapon, I'm so sorry, Immortality is Awful, Is It Even Romantic?, M/M, Nonsexual Relationship, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Post-Post-Post-Canon, So It's Getting the Tag, They're Obviously Together, Victims of Science, Warning for the End of the World, and angry gods, but it's not really a crossover, this is how it goes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:33:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21877444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valentined/pseuds/Valentined
Summary: Vincent isn't the only person on Gaia cursed to immortality, but he does appear to be the only one suffering for it. (What does it take to end the world?)
Relationships: Genesis Rhapsodos/Vincent Valentine
Series: Pieces of Valentine [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1485986
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40





	The End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> What is this? I have no idea. 3200 words of Vincent and Genesis being Vincent and Genesis through the ages.

Genesis had a sense of humor. It wasn’t a surprise, someone who carried themselves through a preternaturally long life on a cushion of charm and sarcasm would have to have a sense of humor, and for the most part Vincent had come to accept it for what it was. It wasn’t as though their paths crossed often, just enough to remind each other that the other still existed, enough to prove that they weren’t alone on the long road to their final duties to the planet.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Genesis crooned from a few seats down at the counter. “What is it, the end of the world?”

The joke was old, tired, and entirely in poor taste.

“Not yet,” Vincent replied, taking a sip of his drink. He’d all but lost his sense of taste entirely a couple hundred years ago, around the same time his teeth turned sharp and he had to learn how to talk all over again to avoid constantly biting holes in his tongue, but this was just acidic enough to elicit _something_. A memory of flavor, maybe. Bitter, sour, unpleasant but present. The best he could do.

“A shame,” the younger man sighed. He was only _just_ younger, of course, what was twenty-odd years anymore? Vincent could and had missed more than twice the timespan by getting distracted in a too-remote region and losing his point of reference for the passage of time.

He wasn’t sure if losing time was better or worse than being intimately aware of it careening forward without him.

Genesis continued, gleaming blue eyes downcast, surveying the dark contents of his glass as he turned it this way and that. “I really thought that whole thing with the Sorceress would have done it, but someone fixed it even without our help. A tragedy, really.”

“Truly,” Vincent deadpanned in return.

It had been a long time since either he or Genesis had interfered with human affairs in any meaningful way; when major diseases made a comeback Vincent would return to the sciences and make a “fantastic discovery” that regurgitated information from a cataclysm or two back that resulted in a cure, and then immediately disappear from the public sphere. When nations went to war with weaponry capable of wiping out the planet, Genesis would rise up through the ranks of one faction until he had the ear of whoever sat in the biggest chair—kings and presidents and prime ministers, priests and heralds and champions—and break down the conflict from within.

It wasn’t what kept them here, but it was something worth doing while they waited.

This most recent time, however, had been staggeringly out of even their control. Too quickly, too much power, too many hands all reaching at once. Neither of them had tried to change it, even though Vincent could feel that this wasn’t how it ended. He had thought, at the time, that perhaps these were the machinations of gods, reminding them both that they weren’t to interfere. They were meant for other things, greater things, more horrible things.

“It might have been nice.”

Vincent glanced at Genesis from under his hood, and the eldest son of Jenova, the youngest of Minerva’s chosen, looked back at him with a sad, tired smile.

“It might have been nice,” the younger Weapon repeated. “To finally see it all come to an end.”

He nodded, just slightly. His feelings on the matter were mixed to say the least, but it _might_ have been nice.

“I suppose,” he said slowly, carefully around sharklike teeth, “that I won’t be rid of you that easily.”

Genesis laughed.

* * *

It would happen again two or three times, never quite the same and always, always not quite enough. Vincent’s horns and wings had come in ages ago, but grew far too prominent to hide much quicker than he’d hoped.

A piece of the broken moon fell, the world changed, everything fell apart, and Vincent found himself as the quarry of hundreds of intrepid hunters over literal centuries, none ever quite skilled enough to strike him down for more than a short period. He regenerated too quickly for arrows and slingshots, and then for guns, and then for magically-charged non-projectile weaponry. Watching technology falter and recover was always interesting, but the turns it took this time were…difficult. The last was the hardest to recover from, gleaming blue beams of light that tore through the blue-white of his skin and left his injuries sizzling and black, tissue knitting too slowly. Materia had crumbled eons ago, but the taste of Holy was thick in the back of Vincent’s throat when a shot from the newest wave of weaponry struck, so sweet it made him sick to his long-empty stomach.

Over the last several thousand years, Vincent had gotten used to being—not invulnerable, but unmatched. He always got away and always recovered.

Until he didn’t.

Vincent came to with a gentle hand on his brow, deft fingers pulling hair from the matted mess where one horn had been blasted off as a familiar voice whispered soothing nonsense too low for any hearing but his own.

His eyes flickered open, struggling to focus, the glow unstable and too yellow on one side. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel that his iris on the left side was too big, pupil contracted tight as the Chaos in him—unconscious but every bit as present as the bitterness of bad liquor—pushed forward to heal the gap where a hunter had blown his skull open.

With a sinking feeling he realized that he wasn’t getting his eye back. He’d lost limbs since the crisis, allowing them to grow back in a slow, grisly process that built up in layers instead of anything close to natural, and every time they came back a little less _Vincent_. Too blue, too big, muscle too hard and tissues too cold. Little by little, Chaos grew back where Vincent was torn away, leaving him a mismatched mess as the unstable shell in which he’d been imprisoned struggled to find some equilibrium.

He struggled to push himself up, but strong hands came to rest on his shoulders and pushed him back down with relative ease that was as familiar as it was foreign.

“Easy,” Genesis whispered, easing him back down. Vincent took the other Weapon in as his vision finally focused, noted the unique styling of his hair and the familiar style of his clothing, the gun strapped to his hip and the ranking insignia emblazoned on the shoulder of his double-breasted coat.

“Back to serving kings?” He croaked out, his voice weak and rough from disuse. It had been a long time since he saw Genesis, the younger of the two preferring to stick to population centers while Vincent had no option to do so.

The slanted smile Genesis gave him in response was forced at best, worry showing through his eyes, the glow distinct in the low light of the room. It seemed sparse at best—an empty storage bay, maybe. It was hard to take everything in, Vincent’s head still spinning as the apocalypse in his veins struggled to regenerate the delicate, integral tissues and materials in his head.

“Head of the guard,” he replied, returning to fixing Vincent’s hair with the utmost care. “One of my units thought you were a daemon and went out to take you down without waiting for word from command.”

Vincent chuckled weakly, shifting slightly, pulling his wings closer in an attempt to get more comfortable. Laying on his back had been awkward for ages, but there was nothing else for it at the moment and he knew it. Genesis, for his part, moved aside to let Vincent pull his extra limbs together, extra joints making it easier to contract into a much smaller space.

“How wrong were they, really?” He asked, closing his eyes again to steady himself before looking up at Genesis again, really taking him in. “You look good.”

“Idiot,” Genesis spat at him, obviously frustrated. “It’s because you’re so stubborn, because you won’t stop _fighting_ her—”

He heaved a sigh. “It’s because I wasn’t given a choice, Genesis,” he interrupted. “I was chosen, you made the choice yourself.”

It was a longstanding argument born of millennia of theories, but the only one that made any sense at this point. Vincent and Genesis were staggeringly similar, both selected to host indescribable power by the Goddess set to protect the planet, both Weapons designed to serve a particular purpose, elements of the end of the world. Vincent, who had never been primed for such a thing, continually changed as the monster he’d been turned into fought to push him into the role he never wanted; Genesis, who spent his mortal life seeking the blessing of a goddess no one else believed even existed, was fully willing to take whatever he was given, and as such was blessed with the gift of _himself_.

It was as good an explanation as any for why Genesis hadn’t changed in all this time, still a strapping young and undeniably human man by all appearances, while Vincent was fairly certain the only thing he still had left of his earlier self—not even his original self, the one killed by Hojo and stripped away by Lucrecia so long ago that the alphabet used to write their names wasn’t even in use anymore—was one eye.

Genesis clenched his jaw, but let Vincent sit up, watched as he put one clawed hand to his head, felt where his horns were coming back again, wiped away black blood from the edges of an injury that no longer existed.

“…I was afraid,” Genesis said at last. Vincent stopped and looked up at him, blinking mismatched eyes and waiting. “When they brought you in, I thought—” He swallowed. “I thought it was the end of the world.”

A moment passed in silence. There was weight in Genesis’ words, his horrible ancient joke. The end of the world. That was Chaos, but it was also Vincent. If Vincent died, if this strange new magic allowed him to die, then what? What would happen if there was no vessel left for Chaos to come back to? Would someone else be chosen, forced into the role at the last minute with no time to prepare, without the benefit of ages to accept their inevitable fate? Or would the world just…never end? Would Genesis continue on alone?

The end of the world.

“No such luck,” Vincent replied at last.

“You’re going to live with me from now on,” Genesis declared. “ I have somewhere safe, somewhere no one will find you. You’re going to live with me.”

Again, Vincent sighed. This was also an old argument—after so much time, Vincent wasn’t certain it was possible to have a _new_ argument. “Gen—”

“You’re going to live with me,” he repeated. Kneeling down, he put his hand against the “good” side of Vincent’s face, the one that was still more his own than Chaos, seeking something in his features and clearly coming away disappointed. “You’re not taking this from me, Vincent.”

“You know I’m not him,” Vincent replied without hesitation, although his broken voice was low. He put one hand, fingertips blackened into claws and too-hard skin cold to the touch, against the back of Genesis' own. “You knew I wouldn’t look like him forever.”

Genesis clenched his jaw, something welling up in his eyes. They never talked about this, never brought up Vincent’s resemblance to the calamity of a man that neither of them had a chance to save back at the start of everything. A name unpronounceable in the current common tongue, a story lost before the end of the Sorceress line purged the last of his will from the Lifestream, casting off the risk of feathers and catlike eyes and whispered horror stories in the minds of the afflicted.

Gaia had recovered from Sephiroth’s death. Genesis hadn’t.

“You’re an idiot,” he repeated, voice tight. “If you honestly think after this long, after all this time—” He swallowed, struggling to compose himself. “You’re all that’s left, Vincent. You know that, don’t you? Strife is long gone, Weiss is asleep until the very end of it, you’re _it_. The only thing left from the world we had. When they brought you in—”

Vincent breathed, and at last he understood.

“—I thought it was the end of the world.”

* * *

If anyone ever heard the stories of the head of the king’s guard having a daemon contained on his estate, it apparently made no difference. The lands under Genesis’ name were vast and walled in with stone and metal and magic, without so much as a gap wide enough for prying eyes.

Vincent almost never came inside, unwilling to risk discovery by Genesis’ staff regardless of how much the younger Weapon insisted that nothing would come of it. He had no idea how Genesis got away with living here for so long unchanging, his immortality apparently unquestioned by the crown he served even as generations came and went. Always head of the guard, with his black, double-breasted coat and gold fittings and buttons, different armors and weapons coming in and out of fashion. He always had Rapier, the sword bonded to him in immortality as surely as Death Penalty was bonded to Vincent, although he seemed to wear it more on ceremony these days than with any intent of use.

The world was quiet these days. Fewer monsters—daemons they called them now, like Vincent—and fewer wars as humanity seemed to reach maturity at last. Genesis had implied on multiple occasions that he’d finally be out of a job if things continued to their obvious conclusion.

Vincent sat on the railing of the balcony outside Genesis’ bedroom, wings pulled tight to his back and one knee to his chest, arms wrapped around it to stabilize his position. He hadn’t realized that Genesis was talking until the young man turned to look at him head on, concern clear in his features.

“Are you all right?”

He blinked, his glowing yellow eye struggling to refocus in the daylight. “What? Yes, yes, of course. “ He shook his head, the off-balance weight of his horns—five on the left side, only two on the right—making the movement more difficult than he wanted to admit. “Just…watching you. Sorry.”

Genesis just looked at him for a long moment, standing straight, symmetrical and human and lovely, stark contrast to the unbalanced horror of his oldest companion.

“Do you want to go find Weiss?” he asked at last.

Something clenched in Vincent’s chest, the gleam of protomateria just under the surface brightening enough to be visible through the shadows of his ribs. Sometimes it pulsed like a heartbeat, more visible in the dark on the nights he would stand on the roof, looking out at the wall and the magical dome above, ruminating on the beautiful gilded cage Genesis had built for him.

“It’s not time,” he said softly, looking away.

“Maybe we’re supposed to _make_ it time.”

Was that it? Was that why the world had seemed so close so many times and always bounced back? Chaos arose just before the end of the world, struck down the wicked to allow his counterpart to gather up the pure Lifestream of Gaia and carry it safely to seed a new world. Had they been waiting this entire time for something that they had to start themselves?

“The war has been over almost two hundred years,” Vincent said. “I can’t—things are too good to start it now. Even if it were up to us.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.” Genesis’ voice was firm. “What is it you want, Vincent?”

“That’s a hell of a question,” Vincent ground out in response, voice dipping into an unintentional growl. His brow furrowed, mismatched eyes narrowing slightly. “When has what I wanted ever mattered?”

Genesis was closer when he spoke again, too close, bringing up his hand to touch the side of Vincent’s face in that too-soft way that he did, brushing dark hair away from the more human of his glowing eyes.

Vincent clenched his jaw, the muscle taut under Genesis’ palm. “It doesn’t matter,” he insisted, voice too tight and too thick in spite of the inhuman roughness and depth. “It’s never mattered, Genesis. Don’t worry.”

“Vince.”

He closed his eyes in something like a wince. Genesis never called him Vince, no one called him Vince—no one had in thousands of years. It hurt in ways he hadn’t expected, making something deep in his chest ache and pull at his emotions, fighting against the careful walls he’d built up over all this time, struggling to make itself known.

What was it Vincent wanted?

“I’m tired,” he admitted at last. “I’m…so tired.” He allowed himself to lean into Genesis’ touch. It wasn’t the first time, but it was rare nonetheless. He held Genesis’ hand to his face with one of his own, the other coming up to circle the younger man’s delicate wrist and hold tight. “I’ve done everything I’m supposed to,” he continued, eyes clenched tightly shut. “I’ve been good, I’ve accepted it, I’m here and I’m waiting and—and I’m _so tired_.” The whine he gave was nowhere near human, and it just made it all hurt even more.

Genesis put his other hand on the other side of Vincent’s face, the side with the crack at the corner of his mouth, with the too-large yellow eye and too many horns, too much blue in the pallor of his skin, enough to make it glow slightly in low light. “Vince…”

Vincent whipped away from him. “I won’t do it!” he bellowed, perching on his hands and feet like a gargoyle on the edge of the railing. “I can’t—we’ve done too much, everyone did too much for me to just— _I won’t do it_.”

“You don’t have to.” Genesis was smiling, but there was something broken in the impossible blue of his eyes. He extended a hand to Vincent, patient, waiting. “You just have to come with me.”

“I won’t do it.”

“It’s all right, Vince,” Genesis breathed. “I understand. Come on.”

He shook his head, long hair whipping around, caught on horns and the sharp points of his ears, the black plating on his wings that was just starting to work its way up his shoulders, like the spurs at his elbows and knees and heels.

“I understand, Vince,” he continued. “You’ve been ready for so long. I’m sorry it’s taken me so many years—” He paused, breath shaky, and held his hand out further, closer to the monster on his balcony. “I’m ready. It’s time.”

Vincent hesitated. Waited. Hurt.

And when he took Genesis’ hand, they both felt the flare of Weiss—of Omega—awakening somewhere deep in the ocean where the Nibel mountains used to be.

Genesis pulled him close, uncaring of the difference in height, wrapping his arms tight around his chest and digging his fingertips into his back, wings and spurs and plating and all. He fit his head against the curve of Vincent’s neck, breathing into his shoulder. He trembled. “I’m so sorry.”

“You didn’t—”

“It’s always been you, Vince. Every time I saw you, I knew.” He gave a squeeze. “I’ve kept you waiting for so long, but…” He pulled back and looked up at him, smiling in spite of the tears in his eyes. “I look at you, I think of everything that’s happened, and—and I can’t help but ask myself.” He almost laughed. “What is it, the end of the world?”

Vincent relaxed.

“Yes.”


End file.
